Friday 4^th January

Last night we had visitors from one of the yachts opposite us on the marina, Colin and Pamela.  They are living on board with an ancient blind and deaf Jack Russell terrier, much loved, who needs to be carried everywhere, and a cat.  They plan to sail up the East Coast soon-ish.  We had a very pleasant evening over a bottle of wine and several gallons of water.  Yes water!  A strange person came and impersonated Pete… This person kept coming up to the table with jugs of iced water with slices of lemon – not sure who this was. but the water was very welcome!  It could not have been Pete, surely!  He thinks water is devil’s work, usually.  But…it is very hot at the moment.  It got to 34 yesterday and is supposed to get to 39 today.  Not like Hobart at all!

We exchanged sailing stories, and I told them my salutatory tale about dropping two bottles of gin into the sea.  They could top this one.  Yesterday Chrissie and Hugh (I think that is their names; not sure, I haven’t met them, but I have seen some pleasant-looking people with a very lively small dog, maybe it is them…) went shopping to provision their boat for three months. They bought $1,000 worth of groceries and loaded everything into one of the marina wheelbarrows.  As they approached their boat – oh dear and oh no – the wheelbarrow tipped over and all of their groceries fell into the water.  Of course not everything sank; toilet paper floated, light rice crackers floated, but all of the heavy, expensive tins of tuna etc sank into the primordial ooze.  Hugh (?) is going to get out his diving gear and metal detector and go looking for his lost food but, as Pete discovered when he was diving for his phone the other day, it is very hard to find anything – zero visibility, plus thick mud, many metres deep, make it a thankless task.  Poor buggers!

India #60

On our train trip from Varanasi to New Delhi our carriage was extremely crowded.  We shared some of our compartment space with Adela and Joshua, charming, articulate young French students.  They were very friendly and interesting.  But...and this is a big but… They ate continuously – packets of chips, bottles of coke, this and that Indian delicacy in a foil container, and they hurled ALL of their crap straight out the window!  Not just their food scraps – we know to throw food scraps out of any window in India because there will always be a grateful pig or goat, mouth open, waiting to receive it.  But everything – all their wrappings, bottles, plastic.  We felt very obsessive-compulsive in comparison, because we always collected up every scrap of rubbish, put it in a bag, and carried it around, sometimes for hours, until we found a bin.  Mary was very tempted to say, “Would you behave like this in France?” but we thought this was a bit rude and confronting.

Once again we emerged from our train hollow-eyed ghouls (thank you for this useful descriptive phrase, Bill Bryson!).  We stood on the crowded platform near the entrance, as instructed, like little lost lambs waiting for our Tasmanian friend Lorraine and her driver, Jassi to find us.  We were apparently standing on the wrong side of the platform, but Jassi is, we soon discovered, an extremely competent and resourceful young man.  He told Lorraine to stand and watch out near one entrance while he scooted around to the other one, where he recognised us with no difficulty at all.  I’m not sure what instructions Lorraine gave him…look for four hollow-eyed ghouls, maybe?  We were all very happy to see Lorraine, looking so lovely, relaxed, acclimatised, and to meet Jassi.

         

As we were approaching the Polgalse apartment in Vasant Vihar, I was burbling on about places we had stayed so far.  “We stayed in some wonderful places, Lorraine, so beautiful!”  And as we walked into the apartment I had to add, “But not as lovely as this!”  She had told me they had a very small three-bedroom place, fairly humble.  Well maybe it was humble by the standards of some of the other expats.  But by our standards it was indeed fabulous!  Marble floors, beautiful (Indian) furnishings, cool rooms.  Vish and Mary had a lovely room on the roof, with access to a rooftop garden, just idyllic.  We had a spacious room in the main apartment, and the best thing of all was we each had our own bathroom.  This is more necessary than you need to know when you are in India… I would actually have preferred to have had a toilet of my very own, where nobody else ever had to follow… But we won’t dwell on this.  Lorraine and Larry are extremely hospitable.  They did everything to make us feel welcome and comfortable.  In our room, for example, Lorraine had provided us with a fluffy white robe for Pete, and a sarong for me, for moments when we might have felt like flitting around the apartment in a state of undress.  (Pete never did wear the robe; but I did, and also the sarong, at various times.)

We had arrived in New Delhi at the exactly right time for Pete and Vish to be able to go and watch the AFL Grand Final at the Australian Embassy.  Larry and his colleague from Kingston, Richard Herweynen, were waiting for them; they had about five minutes to have a shower, get changed and rush off.  I think they really enjoyed this but I fear that not much food was on offer, only beer, and they had missed breakfast.  So I think that Mary and I had a much more peaceful and leisurely, if not so sportingly exciting, introduction to New Delhi.  Lorraine took us to a new shopping “mall”, Basant Lok.  (“Mall” is in inverted commas because it is not how you probably imagine a mall to be; it had cows wandering about, and was not full of designer shops.)  But there was a LOVELY café, Chokola, all clean and shiny and selling espresso coffee and the most delightful fruit juice cocktails.  I think we were starved for vitamins because Mary and I perked up considerably after our speedy consumption of mango, apricot, banana, everything all swooshed up in a chilled glass.